


i asked around half-empty towns (about a girl)

by Fossarian



Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-19
Updated: 2017-10-19
Packaged: 2019-01-19 18:19:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12415431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fossarian/pseuds/Fossarian
Summary: He doesn’t really think about the things he can’t change, and Claire is one of those things.





	i asked around half-empty towns (about a girl)

He finds her blowing a man in the bathroom of a biker bar outside of Joliet, Illinois. He puts the man to sleep and as he drops to the floor, Claire looks up at him, her eyes hazy with drugs and only slightly surprised to find him standing there. She stands up unsteadily and wipes her mouth and Castiel stares at the smeer of lipstick on her lips. 

“How did you find me?” she says.

He shrugs and turns away. “I’ve always known where you are. It was merely a question of looking.”

+

At a 24-hour diner he lets her order whatever she wants off the menu and doesn’t say anything when it comes back all fried.

“Do you want some?” she says, offering him a french fry. For some reason she seems to think she’s being funny.

“Oh that’s right, I forgot,” she says, “you don’t eat.”

“I eat,” he says. He remembers Famine forcing him to eat raw meat on the floor on his hands and knees. “I just don’t like to.”

“Well,” she says and lets her fry drop back to her plate in a laden pool of grease. “What  _ do  _ you do for fun?”

She has a bruise on the side of her neck and the knuckles of her right hand are bloody. She’s young and thinks because she’s had a hard life it entitles her to her anger. But this life entitles you to nothing.

Castiel shrugs. Dean has asked him this question before, in that same vaguely derisive tone, the point more to emphasis Castiel’s social inadequacies than with any real curiosity or desire for an answer. He’s a soldier. Fun is for cubs to do so they can grow up and learn how to kill for real.

“I was wrong,” Claire says. “You’re still an asshole.”

“It would seem so,” Castiel says. “But do you really want to like me, anyway?” 

For that he gets her sullen silence for the rest of the night. She orders three Cokes and refuses to say thank you to the waitress. Castiel leaves the woman an extra large tip. 

+

He sets a chair in front of the motel room door and Claire curses at him and calls him the worst things he’s ever heard. She tries to hit him but when her soft hands bounce off, bruised, from his own flesh, she collapses to the floor and simply screams her rage.

Castiel sits in the chair and watches her. After everything he has been through he still has no understanding of this kind of unadulterated fury and impotence. Humans seem to believe that they alone have the monopoly on pain.

Perhaps they do. They’re welcome to it.

“You life has been hard,” he says over her cries. “But it would have been a lot harder if Lucifer had won.”

She lifts her head and spits at his feet. “Is that supposed to be an apology? If it is, it’s a shitty one.”

“It’s a reason,” he says.

“I hate you.” She pounds her fist on the floor. Castiel hopes they don’t have neighbors.

Eventually she falls asleep, right there on the dirty floor, her wild blonde hair falling down her back and her cheeks salty with dried tears. Curled in on herself like a shriveled and ashen body of Pompeii, her grief petrifying her in that one moment six years ago.  _ I am not your father. _

She doesn’t understand. Castiel wants to explain. But he’s a foreigner in a strange land and he doesn’t have a traveler’s dictionary.  

_ Don’t you know what a war is? I was a soldier and Jimmy was my sword. Did you really want a man who saw what I showed him and said no? _

He looks at her sleeping body, its slightly larger shape. There was a time when, if he spoke, she would have heard.

+

She wakes in the morning and takes a shower and changes her clothes, making a point to stand in front of him while she slips her shirt off over her head. She’s wearing a plain white bra with a tiny bow in the front. She pretends like she’s not watching him for a reaction. Castiel doesn’t know what she expects.

“Have you considered,” he says, his chin resting in his hand, “that the world doesn’t revolve around you?”

She laughs at that, high-pitched and hysterical. The sound rakes on Castiel’s shocked nerves like a gunshot going off. “ _ Nothing  _ is about me, asshole,” she says.

“Is that the problem, then?”

She sits on the bed in a flurry of small violences, yanking a henley over her head, kicking her feet on the bedside table. She stares at him with hard blue eyes, her hatred seemingly endless; her only sustainable energy.

“He was everything to me, y’know,” she says. “He was like god to me.”

“And I took your god away,” he says. He gets it, he does. He never said her anger was unjustified. Just pointless.

She folds her arms across her chest and looks away. Her hair is still wet and drips down her back. Every few minutes she flicks the heavy wet sheet and sends water droplets flying everywhere.

“Why did he say yes?” she asks abruptly.

“It’s not for me to say,” Castiel says. He stands up and picks the towel up off the floor. He can feel her eyes boring a hole into his back. “Your father’s reasons are his and his alone.” As he turns he hands her the towel. She continues to stare at him, not taking it.

“That’s it?” she says.

“Yes,” he says. “Perhaps you can ask him in Heaven. If you ever get there.”

“I won’t go there,” she says, her mouth twisting with contempt. “I’ll  _ never  _ set foot there. Angels are evil.”

He squats down so that he’s looking up at her, sees her flinch at his closeness. “We’re also the only thing standing between you and the dark,” he says, smiling. “Fearing me is a good thing to do.”

She breathes in sharply through her nose, her fist slightly raised as if she means to protect herself, somehow.

“Get your hair out of your face,” Castiel says. He hands her the towel and this time she takes it.

+

He pays cash for an old beige Cadillac to a man named Rory. Claire watches the transaction from a distance. She doesn’t like talking to men unless she has to. Castiel is the exception, but then he is in most things.

“Can I drive?” she says.

“Sure,” Castiel says.

She almost drives them into a ditch and Castiel can’t tell if it was on purpose or not. She plays Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” and then two albums of Metallica and someone named Marilyn Manson. She seems to think a rock star with a predilection towards gothic themes is the best way to get a rise out of him.  

“What do you think?” she says. She keeps asking him questions and is always irritated by his answers. 

“I don’t think anything,” he says. “It’s your music.”

“Well, what’s yours?” she says, hostile.

His brothers, alive. Laughing. Singing. The silence that comes after a battle you’ve won.

He says nothing and Claire presses harder on the speed pedal. But she’ll never go fast enough. Not in this life. Castiel has already been down that road.

+

“I don’t want to be around those psychos,” Claire says and the raw edge of fear in her voice is enough for Castiel to look up from his cell phone.

“They’re bad men,” she says. “Why are you with them?”

Castiel tells Dean he has to call him back and hangs up on him as Dean says “What the fu -”

“I suppose they are,” he says slowly. “But aren’t I as well?”

“Not like that,” Claire says. “Not like them.”

+

Claire is crying in her sleep and Castiel gets up from his chair and sits down beside her on the bed. Her tears are still fresh on her cheeks and he wipes the wetness away. His weight in the bed dips her forward and she gasps awake, her eyes snapping open.

Castiel expects for her to curse at him and try to shove him off the bed. He starts to stand up and Claire startles him by clutching at his shirt, her fingers like claws as they dig into his back. She starts crying harder.

“Claire, it’s me,” he says.

“You’re just going to leave again,” she says, sobbing. Her head on his knee, her tears quickly soak the fabric of his pants.

“I can’t die,” Castiel says.

“Everyone dies.”

Castiel leans forward and rests his head in his palm, his other hand gliding lightly through her hair. “I don’t.”

He is cursed, he has been sure of that for some time now. An endless march into the wilderness, picking up the stray remnants of his past. He wants to tell her that but it probably wouldn’t be a comfort to her.

“What do you want from me?” Claire says. She sucks in air with a ragged shudder, her whole body quaking. Her lashes flutter wetly against her cheeks, her lips parting.  

Castiel sighs. “You can’t give me what I want, so don’t worry about it.”

“You just like to be punished,” she says. She picks at a loose thread on his coat, winding it around her finger. A fresh tear slides down her nose.

“No, I’m just realistic about my expectations.”

That makes her laugh. “I could never stop thinking about you. Ever since that day.” Some of the old anger creeps back into her voice. “Is that some angel thing? Some joke?” 

He shakes his head, not understanding her. She sniffs and wipes her nose. “You fucked me up,” she says flatly.

The wallpaper is a peacock design and Castiel traces the garish lines with his eyes. “That’s what happened,” is all he says.

He keeps running his fingers through her hair because he likes the way it feels. He doesn’t really think about the things he can’t change, and Claire is one of those things. Sam says he’s depressed. Dean says he’s just an angel asshole, like the rest of his kind.  

“Go to sleep,” he says.

“Kiss me goodnight,” Claire says and sits up, knocking the hand in her hair away. She flips the heavy weight of her hair back and releases the scent of her shampoo and skin in a warm wave against Castiel’s face.

_ It’s your funeral.  _ Castiel had heard that on a sitcom once. If there’s one thing he likes about humans, it’s their ability to laugh at their own misery.

Claire says, “Why are you smilin -” but Castiel cuts her off with a kiss.

_ The  _ kiss she asked for. He winds his fingers through her hair and tips her head back, he swallows her gasp down and pushes her back against the bed. He expects her to try to make him stop and when she doesn’t he is surprised at his own lack of interest in doing the right thing.

She is pliant submission under him - an angel could not have asked for more.

But Castiel always wants what he is not supposed to have. He lifts himself up off her. Her cheeks are red and she’s shaking, but she has stopped crying. “Now,” Castiel says, “go to sleep.

“Will you be here when I wake up?” Claire says.

“Don’t ask me things I don’t know.”  

He reaches forward and runs his fingers through the silky strands of her hair. She keeps looking at him for a long time, as if to blink will be to banish him away. But eventually her lids droop heavily to her cheeks. After a while her breathing turns slow and rhythmic and he knows she’s asleep, this time without dreams.

But they’ll come back, and when they do Castiel will be the first one there.


End file.
